Do you have a classic Amiga computer? Do you want to search the web with iBrowse, but keep running into all that pesky modern HTML5 and HTTPS? In that case, [Nihirash] created BoingSearch.com just for you!
BoingSearch was explicitly inspired by [ActionRetro]’s FrogFind search portal, and works similarly in practice. From an end-user perspective, they’re quite similar: both serve as search engines and strip down the websites listed by the search to pure HTML so old browsers can handle it.
The biggest difference we can see betwixt the two is that FrogFind will link to images while BoingSearch either loads them inline or strips them out entirely, depending on the browser you test with and how the page was formatted to begin with. (Ironically, modern Firefox doesn’t get images from BoingSearch’s page simplifier.) BoingSearch also gives you the option of searching with DuckDuckGo or Google via the SerpAPI, though note that poor [Nihirash] is paying out-of-pocket for google searches.
BoingSearch is explicitly aimed at the iBrowse browser for late-stage Amigas, but should work equally well with any modern browser. Apparently this project only exists because FrogFind went down for a week, and without the distraction of retrocomptuer websurfing, [Nihirash] was able to bash out his own version from scratch in Rust. If you want to self-host or see how they did it, [Nihirash] put the code on GitHub under a donationware license.
If you’re scratching your head why on earth people are still going on about Amiga in 2025, here’s one take on it.
it´s boing not boring. Quite embarassing…
It really is. My brain absolutely insisted there was an “r” there last night.
Fixed now, though.
BoingSearch, not BoringSearch!
Fixed.
No, there is nothing boring about it. It is boing as in the bouncing boing ball.
Oh dear that mistake runs right through the article from the headline on. There’s even a picture of Boing Search with the correct name in big letters. And a link titled BoringSearch going to boingsearch.
Does this prove it is not AI-wtitten? To paraohrase: to err is AI but to really mess things up requires a human?
I’m too racist against the frakkin’ toasters to ever use AI to write or proofread my articles. Sometimes this is what happens.
You’re right though that this kind of blind word substitution is a very human kind of error.
Let’s also not forget Wiby search engine (wiby.me, wiby.org etc).
It can find classic websites that don’t use JavaScript etc.
How cool!
Just yesterday I learned that there is a build of the Mosaic browser available as a snap. I’m not usually a fan of those but… trying to build Mosaic to run against modern libraries would be beyond me.
So now I can finally have my dream of being able to surf the web for a day with the first Browser I ever encountered the Internet with!
Well, maybe when this article gets a few days old and the traffic dies down anyway.
Extracting plain vanilla ASCII (or unicode for that matter) is something I kept running into every time I do some kind of resource-constrained project. At some point I found reading RSS feeds through Lynx is actually what works, you don’t get awash in the full-blast HTML/whatever-version-in-fashion minutae of no real use.
Makes me think the next logical step will be search using RSS feed. Actually, it has already been done in a sense, just not the way I need it (simpler).
Meaning, simple things like weather reports, local rumormill, etc, never needed accompanying photos or useless adds. I’ve already stated in another thread that those actually could have been transmitted low-power over-the-air inside the unused frequencies’ SSBs, kinda what Meshtastic is trying to accomplish, but cheaper and without proprietary things, and since it is one-way, it doesn’t need service calls, since it can handle multiple data feeds on the same side band.
Though, I think “internet over the air” in the form of slow speed free access slow speed may be one thing we need, simple search for, say, local pizza maker’s phone and working hours doesn’t need full blast internet and full blast HTML5 delivered in under 12 microseconds. I am willing to wait for few seconds if the results arrive over the air for free, using any $10 AM/FM radio bought at a garage sale. I think this is the right step in the right direction. Retro it is not, if it is STILL usable (sadly, Teletext was invented to do just that – but locked into cable networks, it still required cable subscription).
Also, as I’ve already noted in my other comment elsewhere, making internet browser into Yet Another OS Within OS was a mistake.
Meaning, browser engine, when scaled down to its basics, is mostly ASCII formatting (well, in addition to other internal tasks it is doing – again, AS IF it is its own OS). HTML is formatting, so the browser engine just renders what/how/where ASCII supposed to be shown. In a sense it is a GUI rendering (quite a stretch, but conceptually that’s what it really was originally, RENDERING).
If one is to scale down browser engine to do just rendering (and nothing else – like HTML1), then at some point it makes sense to not even bother with HTML, and go with SVG instead (SVG not only can draw shapes, it can render text, format, etc). If I am to reinvent internet browsing from scratch, I’d probably start with SVG rendering engine, since it will be closer to basics. Actually, I am kind of undecided, since LaTeX offers better separation of text and presentation, and it has similar SVG kind of way of handling vector graphics. LaTeX (or its other forks) rendering engine exists already, so that could be my rabbit hole for another weekend.
All of that was perfectly handled by Adobe Flash
.swffiles which ran just fine on Northwood Celeron and 128 MB of DDR1 RAM.Sadly it was killed in the name of corporate spying by Apple (iOS) and Google (Android).
Macromedia Flash and Shockwave were quite interesting.
And beginning with Flash Player 10 “Square” (late 2000s), it could render vector graphics on the GPU.
Which helped a lot with Flash heavy websites and games.
It worked on Windows XP, Firefox and an GeForce 8 or higher GPU.
Unfortunately, by that time, Flash was already being stigmatized.
Despite the fact that JavaScript and ActionScript had near same syntax and commands.
The iPhone not only killed Flash, but also the desktop internet experience.
When Flash was vanishing, it took full-fledged websites with it.
Why do we have HTML 5, if modern websites look as basic (or even more than) former WAP or i-mode pages?
My site is usable on Motorola 68EC020 at 14 MHz and ~8 megs of ram. But honestly it will work even on Apple 2e/2c with Fujinet and Contiki’s Web browser.
SWF is something more requiring.
website down? i cannot open
I’ve shutdown it for some little time.
I’ll update it adding some rate limit for request to DuckDuckGo and deny-list for search queries and enable again.
Some folks just can’t enjoy good things without trying to break them/make some bad things to them.
I think it will back to work soon. Without search via SerpAPI for some time(just because all tokens up to 25th of Nov. was used today for searching porn with one hero who even written here).